PHOTOGRAPHER

Harry Hook has been taking photographs since 1968. As a photographer for Getty Images his work has been published by newspapers and magazines around the world. Photographing Africa, a feature-length documentary about Harry's work across the continent, was completed in 2014. In 2017 Harry was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Cherry Kearton Medal and Award for “original documentation of Africa through photography”.

WRITER / PRODUCER / DIRECTOR​

Harry Hook, brought up in East Africa, has returned throughout his film and television career to tell stories from Africa. He studied filmmaking at the National Film School. Hook’s first feature film as writer/director, The Kitchen Toto, tells the heartbreaking story of Mwangi, a young Kikuyu boy, who works in the household of a white policeman during Kenya’s struggle for independence. The film, financed by Film Four and British Screen, won international acclaim. Hook then directed a range of feature films including:

Lord of the Flies, – an adaptation of William Golding’s dystopian novel of boys stranded on a tropical island and their decent into savagery.

Last of His Tribe - starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, tells the tragic true story of Ishi, who was the last survivor of a slaughtered tribe of Californian Indians.

All for Love – a love story set in the Napoleonic War, starring Jean Marc Barr, Miranda Richardson, Richard E Grant, Anna Friel and Jason Isaacs.

Hook’s work as a TV director embraces drama and documentary. For the BBC his films include: The Many Lives of Albert Walker – a real life crime story of the Canadian con man and murderer, starring John Gordon Sinclair; Silent Witness – a popular forensic science, crime drama. Hook set the style of this successful series by directing the opening two episodes.

His documentary work for the BBC includes: The Tragedy of Rudyard Kipling – an emotional biographical film about the loss of Kipling’s only son, Jack; The Heart of Thomas Hardy – an evocative film about the life and work of the celebrated writer. Both documentaries rely on dramatic reconstruction to bring the artists stories to life. Also for the BBC, Hook directed The Hidden Treasures of African Art – filmed with Griff Rhys Jones in Ghana and Mali.

For the ITV documentary series Greatest Cities of the World, Hook produced and directed the films on New York and Hong Kong. Also for ITV, his documentary People I have Shot traces the career of David Suchet’s grandfather, press photographer James Jarche. Brothers in Arms uses the intimate personal testimony of eight First World War veterans to create a harrowing account of the war. ​ In Photographing Africa, BBC4, Hook documents his own emotional journey to East Africa as he goes in search of five nomadic women whose portraits he had made 30 years earlier.